Soccer, Made in America

With His Eye on the World Cup, a German Coach Overhauls Team USA

Jurgen Klinsmann Has Shaken Up Team USA, Pushing to Change it From a Defensive Minded Squad to a Free-Flowing Attacking One

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Updated June 5, 2014 9:58 a.m. ET

Jamaica's National Stadium in Kingston is one of the strangest places to play in international soccer. The track that surrounds the field is pristine, but the pitch is marked with patches of bare dirt. There is a scoreboard, but it has no clock.

The U.S. national team came here to face Jamaica last June in a crucial World Cup qualifier they were widely expected to win. But after the U.S. took a 1-0 lead deep into the second half, Jamaica took advantage of a free kick and a sleeping U.S. defense to sneak a header past the U.S. goalkeeper and equalize the score.

In the convoluted math of World Cup qualifying, a tie against Jamaica was as good as a loss for the U.S.—one that could seriously damage its chances of even making it to Brazil for the World Cup. The Americans desperately needed a quick score.

But without a scoreboard clock, none of the players knew how much time was left. U.S. defender Brad Evans asked the referee, but he just ran on by. Finally, an official on the sidelines held up a card. Four minutes to go.

Jurgen Klinsmann at the U.S. team's World Cup training camp at Stanford University in California on May 14.
Reuters

A crisis was looming at a pivotal moment in this World Cup campaign—and to some extent for soccer in America. Team USA needed to strike fast. It was time do what their German-born coach, Jurgen Klinsmann, had been exhorting them to do for months: It was time to play soccer like Americans.

For nearly a century, the world's soccer-playing nations have tried to forge connections between the way they see themselves and what they do on the field. Italy has its catenaccio—literally "doorbolt"—a technical, defensive approach that relies on stifling the opponent's attack and executing quick counterstrikes. Brazil's dance-like samba soccer, with its heel passes and creative wizardry, is the epitome of spontaneity. The English play quickly and directly, attacking with long balls and threatening passes from the flanks toward the goal. And Spain became world champions in 2010 with a style known as tiki-taka, or touch-touch, a possession-obsessed style that relies on short, triangular-patterned passing and freakish endurance.

Before Mr. Klinsmann took the reins of the American team three years ago, playing like an American meant, for the most part, sticking to an assigned position and reacting to the other team's attack. To Mr. Klinsmann, a former German star and national-team coach who moved to the U.S. in 1998, the strategy struck him as wholly un-American.

Mr. Klinsmann, soccer's Alexis de Tocqueville, wanted to build a winner, but he wasn't interested in teaching Americans how to play like anyone else. He wanted to create a squad that represented what he sees as the defining American characteristic—a visceral hatred of being dictated to.

"American nature is to take the game to our opponents. We don't want to just react to them," he explained in an interview last month near his home in Southern California.

Klinsmann on what it takes to become one of the top 10 soccer teams in the world.

Mr. Klinsmann had been hired in the hope of ushering in a new era for American soccer. A year after the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where the national team got bounced by Ghana one game before the quarterfinals, the U.S. Soccer Federation, the sport's overseer, booted Bob Bradley, the U.S.-born coach. To snag Mr. Klinsmann, the federation dangled roughly $2.5 million a year, about three times what Mr. Bradley had earned.

The decision struck U.S. soccer-watchers as a final acknowledgment of what they all secretly suspected: that U.S. Soccer's attempts to build its program with American coaches and homegrown tactics had stalled. No American has ever been a star on one of the world's top club soccer teams—and there was no chance of the talent improving overnight. It was time to hire a European coach, who presumably would copy the methods of the world's best teams.

In the U.S., where children have been playing soccer in large numbers only since the 1970s, there has never been a coherent style of play. U.S. teams, in general, run fast and play hard enough to make the game physically uncomfortable for opponents. Since qualifying for the World Cup in 1990 for the first time in 40 years, the U.S. had played conservatively and defensively. It was good enough for a quarterfinal berth in 2002 and losses in the round of 16 in both 1994 and 2010. "You play to win," says Bruce Arena, who coached the U.S. team in 2002. The strength of American players, he says, "is that they are hardworking and can adapt to different game plans."

Mr. Klinsmann brought his own ideas. In January 2012, six months after taking the job, he gathered 20 U.S. hopefuls for his first winter training camp in Phoenix. Beneath the desert sun, he introduced a punishing style of training. Midfielder Graham Zusi recalls a blur of fitness tests, weightlifting sessions, shuttle runs and agility and quickness drills. "It felt like we barely touched the ball for the first week and a half," he says.

The new coach also has brought in a group of players who grew up in Germany but have at least one American parent, which made them eligible for the U.S. team. They had skills and confidence gained playing the fast, aggressive German style. Five are headed to the World Cup: defenders John Brooks, Fabian Johnson and Tim Chandler, and midfielders Julian Green and Jermaine Jones.

Mr. Klinsmann, a veteran of Germany's 1990 World Cup-winning team, revealed himself to his players as the father who can occasionally be pleased but is never truly satisfied. Execute a perfect pass, or play a perfect game with speed and aggression, and his reaction is: Do it again, and do it even better and faster the next time, every game, season after season.

As coach of Germany's national team, he took a youthful group to the 2006 semifinal by transforming it from a defensive-minded squad to a free-flowing attacking one. He believed the modern game had no place for teams that hang back and try merely to survive—"parking the bus in front of the goal" in soccer-speak. For the U.S. team, he felt this strategy was wrong on another level: it was un-American. "You want to take things in your own hands," he says of American behavior on and off the field.

Mr. Klinsmann taught the U.S. players to see the field differently—to impose themselves on opposing defenses, and for defenders to push high into the middle of the field and even to join the attack. Midfielders, who have to both attack and defend, were sent down the sides of the field where they could send crossing passes in front of their opponent's goal.

Former assistant U.S. national team coach Sigi Schmid on the evolution of the American soccer style.

Most important, he implored them to keep the ball moving around the field, and the only way to do that, he explained, was to stay in near perpetual motion, to search constantly for the open space where they can receive a pass.

Kyle Beckerman, the U.S. midfielder, says that differed from former coach Bob Bradley's philosophy, which stressed every player staying in an organized block of space.

"You want to play an open game," Mr. Klinsmann says. "You want to put your stamp on that game."

In January 2013, during a second winter camp for U.S.-based players, Mr. Klinsmann still wasn't happy. He sensed a bit of self-satisfaction among his veterans.
Landon Donovan,
the team's veteran midfielder, had declared he was taking an indefinite sabbatical from the game, even though the final World Cup qualifying tournament loomed.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal at that time, Mr. Klinsmann made it clear he thought the players were too proud of themselves for making it out of the group stage of the 2010 World Cup before getting ousted by Ghana, a poor nation less than one-tenth the size of the U.S. Such a result, he noted, would cause a national crisis in Germany.

Klinsmann on keeping his players focused on the future.

He said Clint Dempsey, who set an American record with 23 goals in 2012 for the English Premier League club Fulham, hadn't "made s—" in his career. The longtime U.S. captain,
Carlos Bocanegra,
was benched.

He expressed doubt that Mr. Donovan, an American stalwart for more than a decade, would earn back a place on the national team. Last month, Mr. Klinsmann announced Mr. Donovan failed to make the World Cup squad. That move came two weeks after Mr. Klinsmann said the American star no longer had the physical ability to play the midfield—a contention Mr. Donovan disputes.

On Feb. 4 of last year, the team flew to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for the opener of the final, 10-game, six-team qualifying tournament for Concacaf, the regional confederation that includes North America, Central America and the Caribbean. The top three teams would automatically qualify for the World Cup, with the fourth facing a scary playoff match against New Zealand.

With the midafternoon temperature near 90 and the humidity near 100%, hope disappeared for playing the fast-paced, quick-passing style Mr. Klinsmann favored. The Hondurans had grown the grass extra-long to slow the faster U.S. players. To make matters worse, Mr. Bocanegra's inexperienced replacement, Omar Gonzalez, flubbed a defensive assignment that allowed Honduras to tap in the winning score.

On the journey home, Mr. Klinsmann barely talked to his team. Even accounting for searing heat, they hadn't played the way he wanted them to, controlling the ball just 43% of the time and letting the Hondurans dictate play.

He knew he had made a serious miscalculation: Rather than taking a team of U.S.-based players down early to let them adjust to the climate, he had selected several based in Europe, including Mr. Dempsey. They played for club teams in chilly Europe and had just two days to prepare.

Team captain Clint Dempsey on what it's like being coached by Klinsmann.

Six weeks later, the team played Costa Rica in Colorado, where they were bogged down again—this time by a blizzard. After Mr. Dempsey scored in the 16th minute, the defense, with a major assist from Mother Nature, held on for a sloppy 1-0 win. In the next game, against Mexico at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, the U.S. escaped with a 0-0 draw—even though they were outshot 19-1 and only held the ball 42% of the time, worse, even, than in Honduras.

With the team facing three games in 11 days against Jamaica, Panama and Honduras, the Americans' ticket to Brazil was anything but certain. Worse, they were doing about half of what Mr. Klinsmann wanted them to do. They could battle like dogs, but the stylistic renaissance appeared on hold.

The first U.S. goal against Panama in a 2013 World Cup qualifying match shows how Klinsmann's strategies are paying off. Footage: U.S. Soccer/T3Media

With time growing short in the Jamaica game and the score knotted 1-1, the U.S. team knew it had reached a defining moment. The usual reaction of a road team that concedes a late goal is to tighten up and play defensively to ensure another goal doesn't slip by. But the Americans weren't having it. They pushed the ball forward, forcing the Reggae Boyz into survival mode.

With three minutes to go, Mr. Zusi sent a cross into the vicinity of Jamaica's goal, kicking off a dangerous sequence that gave the U.S. a corner kick, a chance to restart play with nearly all its players in scoring position. Sensing the precious seconds ticking by, midfielder
Michael Bradley,
the son of former coach Bob Bradley, sprinted for the corner. "We felt like if we could get the ball back and play quickly, we were going to get another chance," he recalls.

With a little more than two minutes left, Mr. Bradley sent a short corner kick to Mr. Zusi near the left edge of the penalty area, an 18-yard box in front of the goal. He played it back to Mr. Bradley, who beat the Jamaican defender Alvas Powell with a quick pass to Mr. Evans, 8 yards in front of Jamaica's left goal post. "I took a little half turn and my first thought was, shoot!" Mr. Evans recalls.

With three defenders clustered around him, he rocketed a blind shot into the back of the Jamaican net. Twenty-three players joined in the celebratory pile in the corner of the field. About 100 seconds later, the final whistle sounded.

How Klinsmann Transformed Team USA’s Play

By some metrics, Team USA played a very similar game against Mexico under Jurgen Klinsmann in 2013 as it did under Bob Bradley in June 2011. In both games, the U.S. and Mexico held possession for 48% of the game. However, in 2013 Team USA completed 964 passes, compared with 734 in 2011. (See related article.)

June 25, 2011

Mexico 4, USA 2

CONCACAF Gold Cup

June 25, 2011

Mexico 4, USA 2

CONCACAF Gold Cup

Sept. 10, 2013

Mexico 0, USA 2

CONCACAF World Cup Qualifiers

Dots indicate average field position for each player whenever they touched the ball. Lines show successful passes between players; thicker lines indicate more passes.

The U.S. team had done something exceedingly rare in soccer, winning a match in "stoppage-time"—the few minutes tacked on to the end of a game to compensate for prior halts in play. They also had given their coach his first glimpse of the kind of soccer he had been exhorting them to play.

Brad Evans on scoring the winning goal in the U.S. World Cup qualifying match against Jamaica.

Minutes later in the locker room, Mr. Klinsmann, who had been a part of many last-minute wins with Germany, told the players this was the kind of effort required to compete at the highest level. The U.S. didn't just hold the ball for nearly 60% of the game, it repeatedly had moved it deep into Jamaican territory and pressed until the end.

The wins against Jamaica and Costa Rica and the draw with Mexico had left the U.S. with seven points. With six games remaining, three of them on home soil, the 15 points usually required to punch a ticket to Brazil looked easily within reach.

As the team prepared for its home game in Seattle against Panama, Mr. Evans recalls, the whole tone had changed. A collective light bulb seemed to go off when the team watched videos of recent games. "It was all about how we want to impose ourselves," says Mr. Evans.

A day later, in front of 40,000 friendly fans, they showed that Mr. Klinsmann's lessons were sinking in. In the 36th minute, midfielder Geoff Cameron corralled a loose ball 30 yards in front of the U.S. goal. Instantly, he pushed it ahead to Mr. Bradley, who carried it up the middle into the gut of Panama's defense. Fabian Johnson, one of Mr. Klinsmann's German-American imports, sprinting up the left side, took a pass from Mr. Bradley and fired the ball toward the far goal post. Jozy Altidore volleyed it into the net. All told, six U.S. players were either in, or about to enter, the penalty area in front of the goal when Mr. Altidore scored.

To Mr. Evans, the goal looked like one of a half-dozen pattern plays Mr. Klinsmann had been running in practice for a year and a half. "It was almost like there were cones on the field," he says.

"Soccer is so free flowing," notes Mr. Bradley. "We have ideas about what we want to do and ways to be dangerous, but rarely does it come off exactly as you talk about it."

Mr. Klinsmann says of that goal: "This is what the best teams in the world do…Now we need to prove it again. Next game comes, we want to see those sequences three, four, five times. It doesn't have to be a goal every time, but you want to see that change of pace, that execution speed."

A week after beating Panama 2-0, the U.S. smothered Honduras 1-0 on a 90-degree night in Sandy, Utah. The win all but clinched World Cup qualification and avenged the February debacle in San Pedro Sula. Honduras possessed the ball for just 38% of the match and managed just five shots, one on the goal, compared with 13 and five for the U.S. In a tunnel beneath Rio Tinto Stadium after the game, a dazed and exhausted Roger Espinoza, the Honduran midfielder said, "That's a different team than the one we faced in February."

The team's performance in the 2013 Gold Cup last July highlighted the change. The U.S. won all six tournament games, scoring 18 goals on 98 shots, 48 of them on goal. In the 2011 Gold Cup, when the team's lackluster play cost former coach Bob Bradley his job, the U.S. scored just nine goals on 90 shots, only 27 of them on goal. It lost two of its six games, including the final.

As the U.S. team prepares for Brazil, conventional wisdom says it will have its work cut out to be one of the two teams to emerge from its opening-round "group of death," which includes Ghana, Germany and Portugal.

Midfielder Michael Bradley on how he thinks American soccer style will evolve.

Mr. Klinsmann, whose contract runs through the next World Cup in 2018, insists he cannot turn the U.S. men into a soccer superpower single-handedly or quickly. But he isn't letting up. In February, he ran a full-length, intrasquad scrimmage in high heat and humidity of Brazil. "They have to sacrifice themselves," he says of his players.

Whatever the team does going forward, Mr. Klinsmann has given U.S. soccer an American way to play. Joachim Löw, Germany's head coach and Mr. Klinsmann's former assistant, said the U.S. is a far different and more challenging team than the one teams prepared for in South Africa. "Under Jurgen," he said, "they have another mentality."